Blender Sculptie Importer - Attached

Gaia, a followup question if I may, also based on Amanda's work. So a workflow in the best of cases (my wheel is like a torus so is probably OK) is

a) manipulate from straight Blender meshes in 3D view window and finish up by making sensible seam choices,
b) create UV map, using "EAC UNWRAP" (will other unwrap choices work as well?).
c) stretch and move around the UV map to go edge to edge
d) create 64x64 image for UV texture map, UV's->Snap to Pixels
e) create a material to represent a UV texture
f) add materails for the texture mapping x,y,z to red,green and blue respectively
g) bake the textures onto the UV image, and save as a tga file

Multiple use of "material" in different contexts is bad, but need to distinguish.

If this is correct, how much of this does D's bake sculptie script achieve? d) to g) perhaps?

Sounds correct. EAC unwrap tends to give the best "first try results" with arbitrary objects. other uv-unwrap methods should work too depending on the object topology ...

Yes, this is what Domino's scripts do in principle, although they do not use materials and blend-textures, but they calculate the colors directly.

I still don't get what you are trying to achieve. I understand that you try to make a sculptie out of an arbitrary object. So your only problem is to create the uv-map by hand. This is a process completely independent from any script.

But as soon as you got your squared uv-map done, just

"render -> bake secnd life sculpties"

Would do the rest of the job in a split secnd, while the technique shown in amanda's tutorial goes too deep into detail and doesn't render better results (in fact her technique is less accurate than what Domino has implemented as far as i understand the principles correctly) ...

And in addition with Dominos scripts the uv-map must not necessarily be a checkerboard in frist place. See how he unwraps the blender monkey in his video tutorial. the uv-map is only squared, but not modified to resemble a checkerboard. Applying the Bake script apparently moves the uv-vertices around until they are on a grid. (don't ask me, how that works, but it does

However i whish you good luck with your project with or without scripting help

Hmmm, I thought this would be the easy part. I'm not able localise the movement very much. Instead, a big circle of influence appears when I do B, then G to grab a part of the UV mesh. When I move it around, the whole mesh wants to move. D's monkey unwraping video (at Domino Designs) doesn't have commentary that I can hear so his keystrokes are unknown,but I assumed it'd be something like in the 3D view. Instead something different is going on?

My UV map is already horizontally edge to edge, but I need to stretch away sine wave like edges top and bottom.

This make sense?

If you have the proportional editing button (orange donut) clicked in the 3d view then it will affect the UV editor also.

And the white circle visualises the range of influence, so all vertices inside the circle will be affected by the mouse movement. You can controll the range of influence with the middle mouse wheel or with the pageup/page down buttons... If you do not want to use propertional edit mode, locate the orange button as Whyroc has pointed out and disable proportional edit. You can see how moving vertices in the UV-map works in the machinimatrix tutorial about "texturing with multiple images" ...

OK thanks guys. Moving along, I achieved edge to edge and with excitement selected the Bake Second Life Sculpties Option under Render. I picked default options with hole filling and normalising, and it then asked for torus, sphere, ... So nearly a torus, I chose that and the script crashed with a division by zero error at line 226 in Tridraw. It's version 0.21 of the script.

Oh BTW, I had a look at the script where it asks for torus or whatever, and tried again expecting to make a different choice and it failed immediately. Do I need to undo something to try again?

This can be caused by many reasons. Maybe you do have 2 or more vertices in the UV-map, which fall together on one point ? maybe your object only looks like a torus, but in fact it is no torus, but something else (from the topological definition) I would check that in first place. Maybe you can publish your .blend file somewhere so we could take a look at it ?

I dont quite get you here How did it fail ? What happened exactly ?

Without too many details I can only make a few suggestions..

When you did the initial unwrap did you click uvs - layout clipped to image size? any points outside the box will cause problems..

Also you may want to check your normals, in 3d window .. mesh -- normals -- recalculate outside.

To check if its a problem with the mesh you might want to try baking it with a normal material, any artifacts would indicate there is some overlapping or holes. Especially if you have unwrapped from view.. this will put verts behind one another and is hard to see in the UV window.

If you export the object as .obj then reimport it I would imagine any additional sculptie baking information would be cleared, just make sure to check the UV options in the export menu.

At the stage you are at, with an unwrapped model, you could also jump into Amanda's method of creating the RGB material and baking with that. Try baking a larger image and then resizing to 64px later, with a higher margin at least 10.. this should fudge over any small artifacts the results may vary.

If you dont already have sculptyspace this is the place to get it and save yourself some lindens on upload fees

Again I don't use this method, but you have got me wanting to try it once more... /me gets ready to pull out remaining hair..

Another little tip.. join the Area55 group inworld, not trying to push support on anyone but you may get some suggestions there..

-W

OK, can you please try accessing as http://www.wombatdreaming.com/pub/g2.blend

Also remember that this object started off from a python script, with additions and then with spin dup applied. It'll look familiar to you.

It bakes ok for me using Domino's script, but the result isn't too great. There are way to many vertices, remember a maximum of 33x33 at full LOD.

-why

Hi, Canis;

In my honest opinion: what you try to do is impossible even if you manage to get a working uv-unwrap sorry... To understand this, please create a sculptie torus with Domino's scripts. Then look at the vertices and the edges.

Along the torus radius you will find 32 rows of vertices. Now suppose you want to make a maximum count of notches with the minimum amount of faces. then you would take each secnd row and scale it up. You then end up in 16 notches. Your object in contrary has 20 notches. You can not make a reasonable and symetric sculpted prim with 20 notches when you have 32 rows of vertices available in a reasonable way...

Furthermore your object contains about 2500 duplicate vertices. So i removed duplicate vertices, then i baked the sculptie and did not encounter any null pointer exception. So the bake was done, but it did not generate a nice sculptie. it was all crap

I got some reasonable results with the shrink wrap modifier thow. But it still was
super crapy and far away from the anticipated result.


The only possible way i can see, is:

- create a sculptie torus
- look at it from the top view.
- place the 3D cursor into the center of the sculptie
- then set the rotation/scaling pivot to "3d Cursor"
- Now select every secnd row of vertices
- finaly scale the selected vertices up.
- you end up with a raw gear with 16 notches, which needs a bit of fine tuning though....

If you MUST create a gear with 20 nothches, i propose, you try to make it out of 4 sculpties, with 5 notches each. But this has got other technical problems. I really would
use a power of to number of notches to keep symetry...

and if you play around with the initial settings when creating sculpties, you may end up
with better results too... Writing this down would take me too much time, so i am afraid,
you need to find out things on your own or ask dedicated questions along your path they certainly will be answered

i hope, that gives you some pointers about what you can do with sculpties, what you can not do with them.

Gaia, Whyroc, thanks for your time on this exercise. Love the expressions like "crappy" but it's back to the drawing board for me. It's been a good exercise in learning bender. I'll try with less vertices as suggested and perhaps make it thinner and less defined. I was sort of dreaming of shrink wrapping while sleeping (!), and will try that for an exercise.

Perhaps I'll move on to my next project of chain links - any predictions on this one?

ok when I go to do the blend thing, it says "Error see console" what am I doing wrong?

When blender starts up, a secnd window is created, which contains the console messages. This secnd window is often overlooked and many people are not aware of it. What blender tells you here is, "look at the console window. on windows it is a simple DOS-box with some text in it. The console tells you, whats going wrong." On other Operating systems i don't know, how the console looks like but it is definitely available somewhere on the screen.

If you need more detailed answers you will need to describe in a little more detail, what you are exactly doing with the "blender thing".

Especially: Can you reproduce the error and if so, how can the error be reproduced by others...

You should be doing what it says, and looking at the console so you can give us some idea whats happening. It'd also help if you described what you actually tried to do too.

You need to help us to want to help you by demonstrating that you possess a basic understanding of how it works, and what you are trying to do.

"I did a thing and nuffink happened... tell me how to make it work"
...is not an approach that's likely to work with blender users. :]

Ok the error the 2nd window is giving me is telling "face has no texture value" what do I need to do to get that?

Now, that is a little more information

From the fact, that you ask in this thread i assume, you use domino's scripts. So i assume that you know, that the scripts only work with objects created by

"Add -> Mesh -> Sculp Mesh" ?

Now... The error you see typically appears when you have unintentionally destroyed the UV-map associated with the sculptie. You can double check that in the editing panel (press F9). In the Tab named "Mesh" Look for the string "UV Texture" followed by the button [New]. Beneath this button you should see an entry. Per default it is named "sculptie" although it does not matter how it is named, see image below:



If this entry is missing your screen looks like this:



If this happened to you,

- either you have not created a sculpt mesh
- or you have removed the uv-map from your sculpt mesh

If you have no uv-map, sculptie baking does not work. Recreating the uv-map is not trivial and it makes more sense to restart your sculptie from the beginning.

I hope, that helps ? If not, then please add more exactly, what you are doing step by step in order to get this error...

Yes that is my problem. I didn't build in sculp mesh.

Hi. Is there anyway to import an entire object into SL and have it automatically "rebuild" itself?

To explain further, I have a shoe in blender made out of multiple sculpt pieces, I can only figure out how to get them into SL one by one then rebuild it like a puzzle.. Kind of messy. Anyway to upload the shoe at once or something that would have it "rebuild" itself the same way I had it built in Blender?

Any ideas? Thanks!

Ignore this, because Kornscope is my hero!

Um..sorry Keira, but yes there is Jess.
There is an export script (dominos of course) that will export the sculpt maps, the textures and creates lsl scripts (although separate for each sculpt) into a specified folder. File/Export/Second Life LSL (To dir) menu.

The scripts may need a little fixing but it certainly does put all the sculpts together, textured, sized and placed correctly.

May take a bit of tweaking to the scripts but works pretty well.
Used in combination with the also excellent processes by the Offline Builder by Jeffrey Gomez you can do a complete scene and import the lot. Not simple or too difficult but possible.

\o/

Thank you for proving me lacking in information =D

My hero

*swoon*

Thanks for your response Keira.. I did catch it before the edit...



I`m still very confused. I do infact have a folder here with a *.lsl file for every sculpt piece to the shoe.. But what do I do with them?




/edit. Do i *need* to use the offline builder for this? If so, am I just importing the sculpts and lsl files into the offline builder, and from that point there should be an option to export the entire shoe into SL?

I was just looking at this and i found the following procedure:

1.) create your sculpties and export to LSL as Kornscope has described above.
2.) Go to SL and import the sculptmaps and textures of your creation.
3.) Create (number of sculpties + 1) prims (any prim type will do)
4.) Link all prims together to one single linkset.
5.) in each prim except the root prim:
5a) add one of the sculptie-maps and the associated textures to the prim's inventory.
5b) Place the associated LSL script into the inventory. As soon as the script has been stored, the prim is transformed, placed, rotated and scaled to its correct shape at the correct location.

After you have done this process for all your sculpties, your object is finished in its whole glory.

Now you can remove the root prim (the only one, which has not been transformed into a sculptie) from the linkset and your sculptie object is done.

Is there any reason, why the creation process for a multi sculptie arrangement is done in the way i just described above ? Wouldn't it make more sense to create one single script, place it into one single prim and let it behave as a "sculptie generator":

For example, after preparing the prim, clicking on the prim will create the full blown sculptie-set out of nothing. Another click on the generator creates another sculptie-set and so on ...

Do i miss something, or has Domino just not finished the generator yet ?